Books Lost and Found

If I have one peice of advice for my sister who is in college right now, it is “Don’t Sell Your Books!” I regret selling off my books. I regret that in a general way; I wish I still had every book I once had, if only to have a library that resembles the libraries of well-educated people I know and admire. But sometimes, I will find myself in a situation where I need a specific particular book that I once had. It is a terrible feeling. I’ve felt that with at least a dozen books now. I clearly remember staring at my big expensive general entomology textbook and saying to myself, this is one book I will never, never need again. It took 11 years, but sure enough I did need it again. The feeling is worse when it hits me here in Malaysia because so many books are out of reach or expensive enough in Ringgit to be prohibitive.

If I live long enough I think I will have cause to regret each individual book I have owned and lost. The most recent book I’m missing is my old Elementary Modern Standard Arabic Textbook. It was a great big heavy orange book from a class that I was hostile towards to begin with, so somewhere amongst my dozen changes of address and/or times of financial need I sold it. Now that I’m finally studying Arabic again, I miss it sorely. So I was thrilled to come across a pdf of an ancient (1890’s?) Arabic Grammar textbook in English available online. I strongly suspect that it is way over my head, but I’ll take what I can get. Thank you very much to Ghazali.org for making it available. I found it by way of Seeker’s Digest, by way of Alexandalus. Ghazali.org has a huge number of other texts available as does its sister site, Muslim Philosophy.

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You’re currently reading “Books Lost and Found,” an entry on Bin Gregory Productions

Published:: 05.05.05 / 6pm

Category:: On the Web

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Anwar Ibrahim and the Opposition: Malaysian Seeks End to Decades of Firm Rule - a pretty decent roundup of political developments in Malaysia, from the New York Times.

The Spiritual Aspirant: Sidi Khalil Moore will be in Singapore conducting a workshop for The Spiritual Aspirant, to be held 27 June to 5 July. I had the pleasure to hear Sidi Khalil speak in Detroit back in 2002 in conjunction with the US tour of Habib Ali Al-Jifri. I regret I won't be able to make the short trip across the South China Sea to attend, but I recommend it to anyone in the area. The workshop is being sponsored by Simply Islam, under the capable hands of some of the fine people who put on the Journey to Ihsan event a couple years ago, which I did attend and enjoyed immensely.

Collapse Preparedness: The transition from the USSR to the republic of Russia was a catastrophic event for the people who lived through it. The eventual (imminent?) collapse of the US will be much much worse, warns Dmitry Orlov. The USA has a Collapse Gap. Orlov realizes

that some people will react rather badly to having their country compared to the USSR. I would like to assure you that the Soviet people would have reacted similarly, had the United States collapsed first. Feelings aside, here are two 20th century superpowers, who wanted more or less the same things – things like technological progress, economic growth, full employment, and world domination – but they disagreed about the methods. And they obtained similar results – each had a good run, intimidated the whole planet, and kept the other scared. Each eventually went bankrupt.

Valuable lessons on what to expect and how to prepare follow. Read it yourself, but the condensed advice is this: Live on the margins of society. One encouraging sign that Americans are picking up the skills they will need to survive: haggling at the mall.